Perspective: A numbers game

It costs about $75 a day to house an inmate in the Alachua County jail. It costs $21 an hour for a misdemeanor prosecutor in the local circuit to work a case.

The costs that are harder to gauge, but should weigh more heavily on local police when deciding when an arrest is necessary, are the social and financial toll for the person arrested.

They include lost jobs, strained families and hefty legal fees. There’s also a stigma that doesn’t go away when cases are dropped. Arrests live indefinitely in cyberspace.

But if it’s a numbers game that drives some local law enforcement officers to arrest first and ask questions later, then there’s two figures that should force changes.

About 43 percent of the arrests made by the Gainesville Police Department and Alachua County Sheriff’s Office are dropped each year, according to a Sun review of cases from 2008 to 2011.

About 10 percent, more than 1,400 cases annually, are dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Some are minor cases that the budget-strapped State Attorney’s Office decided are not worth the cost of pursuing. Others raise serious questions about whether officers are adequately trained and fully understand procedures.

Local law enforcement, specifically GPD, has had problems other than wrongful arrests that frayed relations with residents. Highly publicized incidents in recent years — such as the police shooting of University of Florida student Corey Rice, in 2001, and an egg-throwing incident by police in low-income neighborhoods in 2008 — caused distrust in the community.

Those and other cases were often followed by calls for a civilian police review board, something law enforcement has fiercely resisted. Instead, an advisory board to GPD was created with no real independent investigatory authority.

If law enforcement leaders want to demonstrate that there’s no need for a board with actual power, concrete steps need to be taken to retain the trust of residents and improve the professionalism of officers.

Options such as mental health court and drug court are good ways to keep non-violent offenders out of the crowded jail, but they’re not enough. Officers must be better trained in proper arrest procedures, taught the value of avoiding arrests in minor cases when possible and kept up to date on relevant changes in the law and court rulings.

They also need to be given leeway by their supervisors to use common sense rather than always hauling someone away in handcuffs. Particularly in a college town with students whose career prospects can be easily damaged, police must consider that wrongful arrests have a social cost that lasts long after a case is dropped.